Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Progressives? They Are Just Actors in a Make-Believe World

Brian Williams … told one whopper of a tale after another for years to pump up his
personal resume and give himself some "street creds" among progressives
who think that Williams and his ilk are intelligent, savvy, and bearers
of the TRUE WORD.

As it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, he lied about saving puppies from
a fire; about getting robbed by a gun-wielding mugger when Williams was
a teen supposedly working for a charity on the "mean streets" of 1970s
small-town New Jersey; about braving Hezbollah rockets in Israel; about
watching bodies float down the Mississippi River during Katrina; about
seeing a man jump to his death in a football stadium; and, of course,
most famously, about flying on a chopper that got shot down in Iraq in
2003. Aside from proving a serial liar, he has become one of the most
fawning, outright boot-licking fans and promoters of the disaster known
as President Obama. He also has served as a regular on progressive TV
shows, where he plays the part of the wise, humorous, Hemingway-esque
man of the world. He is the man who has seen it all, and who can with a
knowing smirk or wink put down and dismiss all the deluded right-wing
nuts out there. In other words, he is a hero and a product of the
Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable
damage to our nation and Western civilization.

Williams joins the ranks of other progressive "journalists" such as,

Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush;

Janet Cook, who concocted a much awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict;

Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times;

Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story;

and, of course, who could forget, The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine.

You certainly can name many others.

I never met Williams, but during my long career did have dealings with
other prominent "anchors"--one of whom nearly ended my career--and found
them boring and idiotic. They were just actors: make-up, lights,
dramatic pose, and read lines written by young staffers from the "best"
schools. There was no journalism as most of us would think of
journalism. The British have it mostly right. They call persons such as
Williams, "readers," because they read the news to you. In one way,
however, American "anchors" are not like British "readers." In our
benighted Republic, "anchors" are vastly better paid, revered, and
allowed a great deal of say over what and how they will report. In the
recent past, if Williams, Rather, or Jennings did not want to report on
something, then it simply must not have happened.

That little world of the "anchor," however, took a major hit with the
invention of the internet by Al "Is it Getting Warm?" Gore--another
fabulist of distinction. We now have millions of little "anchors" who
can fact-check, provide alternative explanations for events, and bring
sunlight to otherwise forgotten happenings and issues. Dan Rather, let
us not forget, got brought down by bloggers. The internet also has
debunked Williams. Imagine, just imagine, if we had had the internet in
the time of Duranty, or even when the Saintly Walter Cronkite declared
that we were losing in Vietnam when, in fact, we were winning . . .

There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay,
requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories
of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog;
Hillary Clinton and her Bosnian snipers; Susan Rice and her video
explanation for Benghazi; Eric Holder with Fast and Furious; and even
FDR who famously said these words now engraved on his DC monument,

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood
running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed
lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I
have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a
regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen
children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate
war.

In fact, of course, he saw none of these horrors. Those things tend not to happen in Hyde Park, New York.

The fundamental problem progressives such as Williams face is that the
world is not as they would have it. Not at all. Many if not most of them
have limited experience in the real world, having spent lives of wealth
and privilege, sheltered in progressive educational institutions. They
have very superficial knowledge of the world outside these bubbles, and
rely, therefore, to a great deal on Hollywood. They incorporate into
their personae the largely leftist rubbish pumped out by Hollywood.

In their world, the United States is still 1930's Alabama--or, better
said, the Alabama of Hollywood. They want to unleash their inner Atticus
Finch. In their world, murderers in the United States are middle aged
white male business executives who kill black people instead of what
happens in the real world where murderers are overwhelmingly young black
men who generally kill black people. In their world, women can kung fu
better and be bigger badasses than big burly guys, when, in fact, the
opposite is true as shown by the progressives' contradictory and
ceaseless calls for government to "protect" women from men. "I am woman! I am strong! Call the cops! Men are looking at me!" In progressive world, the KKK equals the Tea Party, when in the real
world, the KKK served as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. In
progressive world, Western civilization is the source for all the
poverty and evil in the world, when, in fact, the concepts of liberty,
justice, and human rights are Western constructs.

Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very
interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that
he or she knows what's what, and that progressivism is what the world
needs to deal with "problems"--after all, isn't life just a series of
problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what
they believe.

We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them,
the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy
trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs--the sort of
worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our
lives.